GLOBAL RESOURCES

"Environmental refugees,"
etc.

Feeding the world: Technology has no
answer

What humanity is up against, in the view of plant geneticist Nina
Fedoroff, is "the limits of the earth to absorb more human
population, more human economic activity, more people." The
world's population, currently some 5.6 billion people, now grows
by roughly 93 million persons a year--about the population of
Mexico. That's faster than supplies of food can be increased,
says Fedoroff. While world food production continues to rise, the
amount of food per person has been dropping for more than a
decade. Per capita supplies of fresh water are one-third lower
than in 1970.

At the same time, the earth becomes less fertile, partly
from overuse and the farming of marginal lands, and partly from
the techniques of modern farming. These techniques are only a
short-term solution, says Fedoroff: When chemical fertilizers are
first used, the farmer gains a phenomenal nine tons of grain per
acre for every ton applied to the land. But the miracle passes.
In the long-term, irrigation causes toxic salts to accumulate in
the soil, which then grows nothing. Bugs evolve resistance to
pesticides. And as for chemical fertilizers, says Fedoroff, yes,
you can use them to compensate for topsoil loss--for a while.
After a time, though, larger and larger amounts of fertilizer are
required to get the same yield. Finally, a point is reached--
where
much of the developed world is now--that adding more fertilizer
gains little.

Fedoroff, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution of
Washington's Department of Embryology on the Homewood campus,
says that new dwarf species and new strains of plants that
respond especially well to chemical fertilizers (i.e., the "green
revolution") are scarce these days; she believes those approaches
have just about reached their limit.

Fish and other food from the waters of the world are also
declining, as a result of overfishing, siltation, and various
forms of chemical pollution-- especially from pesticides and
fertilizers. "Agriculture is the most environmentally damaging
thing man ever invented," says Fedoroff.

Meanwhile, the world's population keeps on growing; that is
the root of the problem, and one for which there can be no
technological fix, Fedoroff says. The world population has more
than doubled from 2.5 billion in 1950. At current fertility
rates, it will double again by 2035. "Technology and science
can't pull humanity out of a disaster caused by too many people,"
says Fedoroff--a concept that, for the first time, she now sees
publicly acknowledged.

In 1992, the Royal Society of London and the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States--probably the two most
prominent scientific societies in the world--issued a first-ever
joint statement on population growth, resource consumption, and
development. The statement says that the world's population
growth must be stemmed, as well as the industrialized world's
wasteful and polluting use of resources. Otherwise, Fedoroff
summarizes, "science and technology can do little to prevent
increasing misery, increasing floods, and increasing economic and
climatic disasters, all of which are interconnected." Later, in
October 1993, the first-ever Science Summit on World Population,
sponsored by the world's scientific academies, concurred.

Population pressure is most acute in the less developed
nations, and as that pressure increases we all know that more and
more firewood is cut, more and more cattle are grazed, more and
more land is overcropped and deforested. The scenario is
familiar. Massive erosion results, and people must go further and
further, abusing more land, in their desperate search for food
and firewood. In the mountains, such as the Himalayas, deforested
soil cannot absorb the rain, causing floods in the plains below
(most famously in Bangladesh).

What's new: In addition to the immediate human suffering,
says Fedoroff, it is now known that these effects cause climate
change, a fact that scientists have only recently realized
because it just wasn't obvious. For instance, South America's
traditional slash-and-burn agriculture worked very well when a
single farmer cut down a small area, used it, and moved on--the
forest could return, and certainly there was no significant
climatic effect from a five-year farm-sized gap. Now that
millions of acres are being transformed into grassland, however,
Fedoroff says it suddenly becomes clear that the plentiful
moisture of a tropical rainforest is "largely caused by the
biological activity of the trees." In Malaysia, the remaining
forest is no longer too wet to burn, and for the first time,
Malaysia gets forest fires. It is not yet clear what a drier
tropical zone will mean to global climate--perhaps much.

A social consequence of these global changes can be seen
already: growing numbers, currently more than 20 million, of
"environmental refugees"--people whose land is so blighted that
in
order to survive, they must leave. Africans, for instance, are
driven from home not only by war, but by war combined with
famine, notes Fedoroff. She sees the current African wars as
fights over scarce resources--resources that would have been
adequate for the population of 20 years ago.

No part of the globe will be exempt, including the peoples
of the United States and Western Europe, says Fedoroff. Having
achieved industrialization and low birth rates, she says, "we
think we're immune. We do not understand why suddenly we have
problems with so many people flowing into our countries. And this
is not a problem that is going to go away. It is estimated that
90 percent of the population growth of the next century, even the
next decade, will occur in the less developed countries of the
tropics, which are already bulging at the seams." Both Florida
and California--highly prosperous states until a few years ago--
are
suffering in part from the strain of absorbing refugees. Fedoroff
says, "People will come north. They're coming already."

So is it too late? Fedoroff pauses. "I think it may be. But
I also think that every one of us has the responsibility to act
as if it isn't, and to do whatever he or she can to contribute to
solutions."

As her contribution, Fedoroff will leave Carnegie in June
1995 to become professor and director of a biotech center at Penn
State. There, working through both traditional agricultural
researchers (like plant breeders) and scientists of the most
modern and genetic stripe, she hopes to help stave off a
worldwide food crisis with recombinant DNA technology. For
example, in one current approach, genes for bacterial molecules
that poison insects can be transferred into plants. In one
such--Dipel, now on sale in hardware stores--the farmer never
needs
to spray, because any insects that actually chomp on the crop
will die.

The recombinant approach is controversial, because people
are afraid of it. "There are barriers," Fedoroff says.
Nevertheless, she's on the charge. "Society has given me a very
long time to sit in my corner and do my research. I feel that
it's time to pay some of that back--knowing full well that I
could
fall on my face and accomplish nothing." --EH

On avoiding extinction

Steven Stanley is an authority on fossil bivalves and punctuated
evolution. So it comes as no surprise that when he looks at the
present, he sees it through the window of the very distant past.
And the message he brings back is mildly hopeful.

At least in temperate parts of the world, says Stanley, the
groups of plant species we think of as "belonging" together may
not be so invariable. Therefore, we need not expect catastrophe
just because our ecologies are not the way they were a hundred or
a thousand years ago. The key word is "variety."

"In thinking about the future and the way we relate to
natural ecosystems," Stanley's thinking has been altered by "the
discovery that our biomes, what we view as being natural
biomes--associations of plants, especially trees--are not really
ancient. In temperate zones like the ones in North America, they
do not represent ancient co-adapted assemblages of plants that
evolved together to fit together effectively in nature. In fact,"
says the professor of earth and planetary sciences, "they are
temporary associations that formed while we emerged from the
recent ice age, just 10 to 15 thousand years ago."

Stanley knows that from fossil pollens, which clearly show
that 20,000 years ago, oaks and pines grew together down in what
is now Georgia and Alabama, as part of a totally different
arrangement of species. Today, their only association is in the
pine barrens. Inland, oaks are centered in the Appalachians--they
like a warm climate--whereas pines are mainly found in the north.
Furthermore, Stanley sees similar shifts in fossil sea life. "So
it's clear that as climates change, biomes do not shift as units.
Rather, individual species shift in accordance with their
environmental requirements."

The implications? "Certainly we want to preserve species, as
well as important and beautiful associations of species. But we
can't necessarily say that the assemblage has to be exactly what
we found here." More doably, says Stanley, foresters and
agronomists can aim at "associations that work compatibly, that
are beautiful, and that preserve a lot of diversity."

What we must not do, in Stanley's view: "plant monocultures,
like a lot of the lumber companies have done. Monocultures are
unhealthy. It's like people living in cities. When they're
crowded together, they give each other diseases. It's the same
with trees." If the trees are all one species, a single blight
can wipe out the whole forest. "If you look at Cro-Magnon man 20
or 30 thousand years ago, they were big people. They were like
Europeans today, but the men were 6 feet tall. That's because
they didn't have a lot of the childhood diseases that we have
now, and they ate well--meat and berries and various kinds of
natural food. When people moved to cities, they got smaller, and
they suffered enormous consequences in terms of disease. The same
is true of plants in nature."

Stanley agrees that the globe is probably entering another
period of mass species extinction, largely from human actions,
including the ones that are probably warming the globe. "If
you're going to kill off species all over the world, a change of
climate is the best way to do it."

Any lessons from the past? Yes: In species extinction,
expect the most loss in the tropics. Tropical forests do not
create deep loam like northern ones; the soil can therefore turn
into desert with extraordinary ease. And tropical biomes, again
unlike the northern ones, have not suffered from unstable
climates. Thus they do have long-evolved and extremely
specialized interactions, such that the loss of one species can
do in several others. For instance, a fruit tree that can be
pollinated only by a single bat species will go extinct if the
bat goes. "There's a tremendous domino effect," says Stanley. In
mammals, expect the greatest loss among large ones. Needing more
food, they are more scarce to begin with.

Although humans are big animals, Stanley does not believe we
are an endangered species. "We have to recognize that we have an
extraordinarily broad ecological niche. We've been omnivores long
before civilization arose. And because of our intelligence, we
can find ways to adapt to all sorts of conditions," he says.

"We can get to all corners of the Earth--all elevations, all
climates. We are relatively resistant to any single agent of
extinction, because it would tend to focus in one region, or to
people who behave in a particular way. And we are unique in that
we are constantly expanding our ecological niche. We can live in
outer space if we want, some time in the future. We have people
living for many days beneath the ocean. So we can't compare
ourselves to large animals in being especially vulnerable." -
-EH

Grassroots environmentalism

When Ellen Silbergeld attended the first United Nations
environmental conference in 1980, she saw "heads of state,
scientists, and mostly men and white faces from affluent
countries." Twelve years later, at the U.N. conference held in
Rio, she saw all sorts of faces--black, brown, white, female, and
people from all walks of life. The change in faces, she says,
represents an overall shift in the environmental movement.

"Over the past 10 years, and accelerating very much over the
past few years, there has been a transformation of environmental
issues from the interests of a small elite to the concerns of
people who are in many ways marginalized and excluded and
oppressed," says Silbergeld (PhD '72), professor of toxicology
and epidemiology at the University of Maryland, and an adjunct
professor of environmental health sciences at Hopkins's School of
Public Health.

Poor communities and communities of color are often the ones
that bear the environmental burden of development, says
Silbergeld. They are starting to speak out about problems in
their own backyards, which is forcing members of the "elite" to
broaden their views. "Now we're not just concerned about burning
down the rainforest, says Silbergeld, but also about "people in
the rainforest."

In almost any region of any country, says Silbergeld, the
grassroots environmental movement is taking hold. A few years
ago, she visited the family of her foster child in rural
Thailand. Did the family want to hear about Michael Jackson,
Alien movies, or other popular culture we export? No. More than
any other topic, they wanted to talk about deforestation,
pesticides, and the dumping of waste into the river. "I could
have closed my eyes and been talking to a group of Americans,"
says Silbergeld.

The movement has grown so quickly, says Silbergeld, in part
because "environmental problems have become so gross that they
cannot be ignored by anybody." Environmental groups, particularly
Greenpeace, have also increased interest by publicizing the
problems--though with increased publicity, some environmental
issues have been distorted, adds Silbergeld. "Is .001 percent of
pesticide in kiwi fruit in 1 percent of the world's population
the big risk, or is it lead in most of the developed world?" she
asks. "While we are fixated on relatively small risks, there are
other huge environmental problems out there." --MH

Facing up to making choices

As Laurie Zabin looks at the globe, the population dynamics
researcher sees three imperatives converging, like massive armies
marching toward a single battlefield, recruiting soldiers as they
go:

(1) larger and larger numbers of people, in larger and
larger concentrations.

(2) technology that changes with unprecedented speed.

(3) a growing political insistence--"or moral insistence, if
you prefer"--that all peoples have certain rights, not only to
self-governance but also to the fruits of technology. This third
imperative is the new kid on the block. However, the kid is
already very popular, worldwide: Liberalism and socialism are
both expressions of this third imperative, Zabin points out. So
are the plethora of groups fighting to create their own country,
or at least carve out an ethnic domain.

As these three forces intersect, says the School of Public
Health researcher, something has to give. Choices must be made,
which most people are not yet willing to do. Take the current
debate in the United States over health care. "Conservatives say,
So what, everyone can't have it. Liberals say, But everyone
must." Others try to redefine "it" into something manageable--but
even if that succeeds, swelling population and technology will
soon recreate too much demand for countless possibilities. Once
the fruits of the Human Genome Project are in hand, for instance,
the same issues arise: Given all these people, who will get
genetic testing and treatment, for what purposes, at what level,
and how on earth can we pay?

"Dynamic systems always involve choice," says Zabin.
"Whether it's natural selection or whatever, something lives and
something dies. We are blinding ourselves to the knowledge that
technology and knowledge both force choice. Either we will make
choices, or choices will be made for us--and we may not like the
consequences."

Zabin's specialty is population dynamics, more specifically
adolescent pregnancy, which she sees as one such consequence. "We
tend to blame the teenagers, and the problem is not the
teenagers! The problem is that technological change put millions
of people out of work, and family structures that were dependent
on the parents having jobs broke down."

In passing, Zabin wonders why no one talks about the issues
of control that are posed by today's technologies. What if the
new genetics, for instance, were to be controlled by just a few
people? Or world communications? "These are huge moral issues.
The kind of control a tyrant could exert 500 years ago is nothing
compared to what a tyrant could exert today. Every single cave in
the world would be endangered. It's a frightful risk."

Can humans possess knowledge and not use it? Could we
understand the human genome, yet give genetic testing to no one?
That's not an option, says Zabin. "Knowledge is one of the
choices we have made. We have a basic principle that if we can
know something, we should go ahead and study it." --
EH

Catch if catch can

"Any resource that is openly available will be used up entirely."
That is the gist of the "open resources model," generally
accepted among economists. Philip Curtin, Hopkins historian,
Africanist, and MacArthur fellow, thinks it applies to all the
world's resources.

To understand the model, take the example of a fishing
village and its fishery. "The proposition here," says Curtin, "is
that if you have a limited number of fish out there, from the
point of view of each individual fisherman, your best option is
to catch as many as you can. Because if you don't, someone else
will. And the fish will disappear. But they will disappear even
if you don't catch 'em."

In such a situation, there is no incentive for restraint,
but every incentive to take while the taking's good. That is true
even for a person who knows and regrets the damage done, he
emphasizes. "So the interest of each individual fisherman is to
destroy the environment that has sustained the fishing community
over all these years."

Curtin's other example comes from the fur craze of the 19th
century, when both beaver and buffalo were essentially eradicated
in the United States. The sea otter was fished out in both the
U.S. and Canada. "In general, people's self-interest will lead
them to go on and basically destroy a resource for their own
purposes," Curtin says. "That's natural. People are often
selfish."

To preserve any resource, then, there must be an
intervention. There must be some higher authority that takes a
long-range view and has the power to enforce it--as there was in
the case of sea otters. The only reason we have otter now, says
Curtin, is that the "Russian equivalent of the Hudson Bay Company
had a monopoly, so in its own interest it protected the sea
otter." Eventually, the animals spread back from Alaska into
other parts of their former range.

More usually, the authority has been a government. Curtin
says the open resources model is extendable to the situation in
the former Yugoslavia. "Until you had a state big enough to
protect minorities from each other, in an area where everyone is
a minority, you had constant warfare." Then after the collapse of
the big state, the warfare resumed. "The same is true in Rwanda,
Liberia, Zaire, and Angola_. Something like the Austro-Hungarian
Empire gets to look pretty good."

In today's world, governmental clout seems to be waning (see
pages 54-56). For instance, it is hard to see what authority will
protect public U.S. land from improvident mining, grazing, and
logging. The Department of the Interior is helpless, Curtin
believes. "The president's need of those western senators is such
that he can't let Bruce Babbitt loose," and the senators need the
PACs. --EH

Out of our hands?

Alan Walker discourages a human-centered, static view of the
world as being "incredibly short-sighted." What humans do to the
globe, he thinks, may be less important than what the globe does
to itself. "You have to realize that my own home country
[England] was nothing but a sea of mud and rock after the
glaciers withdrew. There was no life under the ice sheet, and it
must be the same with geomorphology all over the world." Yet, a
mere 20,000 years later, those former mudflats have metamorphosed
into a complex tapestry of cities, farmland, forest, and so
on.

On the scale of 50 years, he points out, we can see islands
disappearing in the Chesapeake Bay. On the scale of a day, we
might see a volcanic explosion that, like Krakatoa in 1883, would
fill the skies with ash and create a worldwide "summer that never
came." So, says the anatomist/paleontologist, a MacArthur-winner
who has worked in Africa with Richard Leakey, "earth is a very
dynamic, unpredictable place. Humans just aren't used to seeing
it that way."

He does wonder about human extinction, especially as
resulting from population pressure. "The world is populated by
two sorts of organisms," he says, matter-of-factly. "Bacteria and
algae, and the rest of us. We could be looked on as fermentation
chambers for bacteria. And bacteria and algae will survive even a
nuclear holocaust."

On balance, however, Walker refuses to be a doomster. There
is a feeling of doom in the air, he says. Everyone worries. But
Walker wonders, contrariwise, "how much this feeling is due to
our having so much information." A hundred fifty years ago, a
letter took three months to come from the Caribbean. "Today,
everyone has transistor radios. Everyone knows what goes on
everywhere, so you can get terribly worried about something
happening in China."

Walker is unsure such worry is justified. "When I go to
Africa for months on end, I don't hear these things. When I come
out and read the news, it's all the same stories, but the
characters have changed. Instead of Gennifer it's some other
woman. Instead of Somalia it's Rwanda. I think it's very easy to
worry about everything. People are expected to worry
compassionately about all these things. I suspect that most of us
don't have enough compassion to go around." --EH